Some students have already started solving and annotating their problems tonight. Feel free to watch how it unfolds on the wiki.

Over this past weekend I created a new wiki and seeded it with exam level problems. The details are posted on the front page of the wiki, but in brief, the assignment comes in two parts done over two weeks:

A Significant Contribution or Week 1

Solve a problem completely. Annotate well enough so that an interested learner can learn from you. Make the layout clean, clear, and complimentary to the articulation of the solution.

Students often think this is the hard part of the assignment. I think it's the easy part. It's more or less like a Scribe Post focusing on a single problem. Granted, some of the problems are challenging, but the timeline for this, 1 week, is supposed to make it a low pressure sort of thing. Unless they leave it for the last possible moment; most don't some do. I mean, they have a week to do something that could reasonably be assigned as an overnight homework assignment.

A Constructive Modification or Week 2

This time next week the real fun begins. (The real metacognitive work.) Each student must scan through the entire wiki looking at each solution their mates have done, find one that has an error, and fix it. They must edit someone else's work, not their own.

Week 1 was just a set up for this; this is where I think the real learning happens.

As they read through several solutions looking for errors they have to decide what is right or wrong and why. They question each line of every solution verifying each other's thinking as they read through. The hardest part for me, as the teacher, is to not say anything.

This all ties in with one of the three guiding principles I always think of as I design learning experiences for my students: Make Thinking Transparent. This is particularly well illustrated in this assignment.

Saturday, April 11, 2009

I've become more and more interested in visual design as it pertains to teaching. I see a lot of teachers new to using a SMARTboard creating long, text heavy slides in their lessons. For myself, I've started a collection of feeds in my reader called Visual Thinking and it's had a dramatic impact on my own slide design process.

If you watch TED Talks you may have noticed that the visuals used by speakers at this years conference are qualitatively superior to those used in the past. TED has hired Duarte Design and assigned each speaker a small stipend to have their visuals given a makeover by the folks at Duarte. You can really see it in the visuals used in these two talks:

» Break apart big ideas into smaller bite-sized pieces.
» Simplify the message (even when you’re talking about using game theory to predict the future!)
» Give a message space to stand out and contrast to focus attention.
» Use more visuals and less words.
» Use clear, easy-to-read charts with simple shapes and colors to add texture and clarity.

If you're new to using an Interactive White Board (IWB) in your class I think this is an excellent list to use as a starting point for slide design. When designing slides for classroom instruction these are the ideas I use as guidelines. I'm working hard at evolving how I present information to my students daily. Particularly when teaching more conceptually difficult material.

This is how I introduced statistics the first time with the SMARTboard:

There's still lots of room for improvement in that second set of slides above. I'd genuinely appreciate any suggestions you may have about improving this particular slide deck or my approach in general. Can you suggest a specific image that might fit nicely into this lesson?

I'm going to keep trying to increase my use of visual images and since SlideShare added the ability to embed YouTube videos in each slideshow I've been trying to have at least one instructional video inserted into every day's set of slides.